How do judges of the Florida District Courts of Appeal reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.

Florida District Courts of Appeal / Joined 1982 / Served to 1993

James E. Lehan

Judge, Florida District Courts of Appeal

James E. Lehan was a Judge of the Florida District Courts of Appeal, who joined the court in 1982. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Lived: 1929–1993
Tenure: 1982–1993 · 11 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1982	Florida District Courts of Appeal	–	–

Education

University of Virginia-Main Campus
University of Virginia-Main Campus

Judicial Record

In our data, Lehan authored 568 published opinions for the court (1983–1993), plus 1 dissent and 3 concurrences. Most cited: Muller v. Stromberg Carlson Corp. (72 citations).

Published, precedential opinions from the CourtListener corpus. Counts and rankings are objective and recomputable: how we count. We describe the record, not the judge. 304 of these were attributed to Lehan by a unique court-, date-, and surname-match against our roster (marked ), because CourtListener recorded no author for them. Each links to the official text to verify. How we match.

Selected opinions

Year	Case	Citation	Cited
1983	Muller v. Stromberg Carlson Corp.	427 So. 2d 266	72
1985	Budd v. State	477 So. 2d 52	54
1990	Roberts v. State	559 So. 2d 289	53
1983	Linehan v. State	442 So. 2d 244	53
1986	Zordan v. Page	500 So. 2d 608	40
1986	Tsavaris v. NCNB NAT. BANK OF FLA.	497 So. 2d 1338	35
1984	Jones v. State	459 So. 2d 1068	30
1985	Egal v. State	469 So. 2d 196	28
1984	In Interest of WDN	443 So. 2d 493	28
1992	Kremer v. Kremer	595 So. 2d 214	27
1983	B & L MOTORS, INC. v. Bignotti	427 So. 2d 1070	27
1986	Carr v. State	495 So. 2d 282	25
1983	Smith v. Mogelvang	432 So. 2d 119	24
1992	Gregoire v. Gregoire	615 So. 2d 694	23
1984	St. Petersburg Yacht Charters v. Morgan Yacht	457 So. 2d 1028	23

Showing the 15 most-cited of 572 authored opinions in our data. “Cited” is inbound citations across the CourtListener corpus. Case links open the ruling’s full text (CourtListener) or its page here; read the methodology and verify against the primary source.

Questions & answers

How do judges of the Florida District Courts of Appeal reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was James E. Lehan on?: James E. Lehan was a Judge of the Florida District Courts of Appeal.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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11 years on the Florida District Courts of Appeal. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).